I hope that in 2022 we can become more attuned to the natural world. The omens are not good.
A major problem is our obsession with computer screens and the world of AI. Instead of treating them as a tool – a very useful tool, especially for crunching numbers, but still a tool – we allow them to dominate our waking moments; and accord AI a degree of kudos it doesn’t deserve. And it matters because in so doing we forget we’re a part of nature, that the natural world is responsible for us being able to send messages, see the screen, indeed to see anything at all.
We’re allowing AI to constrain our thinking. Here’s a topical example.
A Covid Christmas
The weekend before Christmas, I caught Covid. At least I’m as certain as it’s possible to be that that’s when I caught it. Most of the family we were visiting came down with it too, at the same time. And in the preceding days, my only ventures outside were a whiz round Waitrose (ten minutes) and cycling into Reading for (ironically) a Covid booster. If I’m right, the incubation period was only two and a bit days, but that’s possible according to Harvard – especially with Omicron.
Once the PCR confirmation came through, I received emails and texts from the NHS, including about the need to respond to Track and Trace. I wanted to be helpful, so had a go, but my enthusiasm was soon evaporating.
It wasn’t so much the length of the form – but why does it have to be so long? – or the related fact that it was asking a (presumably ill) person questions that could have been asked of others (e.g. what is your partner’s NHS number? I don’t know! Why don’t you email her and ask directly, given you say you’re going to email her anyway?) Nor was it even quite the fact that you had to cross your fingers and hope common sense about exceptions would apply (“people in your household will also need to self-isolate for 10 days …”; hopefully the following page, which I couldn’t see without completing this one and pressing Continue, would have said that they’re actually exempt due to having had two doses already – but I wasn’t willing to take the risk of entering their details and have them bombarded by stay-in-your-room-during-Christmas messages even though they didn’t have to). The fact that the form appeared out-of-date didn’t engender much confidence.
No, it was none of these. The biggest issue I had with the process was the unthinking formulaic rigidity of it. After I’d given up with the electronic form, I was rung the following morning – and once I was persuaded it wasn’t spam and I spoke to a person, we tried again from where I’d left off.
The phone call did not get off to a good start. I was informed that I would have to self-isolate for 10 days. This now being the Wednesday, my response was that that statement contradicted the government announcement that I could take tests on days 6 and 7 and – providing they were both negative – be released then. Oh yes, said the caller, you’re right.
Having cleared up that none of the 20-odd work categories they list apply to me, I was then asked about where I went between the 12th and 16th. Now I’m confident I caught Covid on the 17th. I wasn’t convinced it was going to help anybody to talk about a rapid and irrelevant trip to Waitrose, or cycling to have a booster (standing masked in a socially distanced queue when I got to the venue) – and I wanted to get on to the 17th – so I answered “Nowhere”. A lie, but hopefully a white one.
So next I was asked how I thought I might have caught Covid. I said I knew exactly (an exaggeration), and then said it was visiting family that weekend. You’d think (at least I did) that might be received as an invitation to explore the family visit – who? where? did I visit anywhere else that weekend? … I had my answers prepared. Instead of which, the next words I heard were “Thank you very much, that’s all” and it was over.
I can only guess that my answers didn’t fit into the boxes. The system had decided I had caught Covid between the 12th and 16th, and there was no entry for recording details about persons visited on the 17th. Computer says No; end of call.
Non-algorithmic thinking
In the 1990s, I struggled with a couple of heavy books – The Emperor’s New Mind and Shadows of the Mind, written by the physicist Roger Penrose. Penrose, a genius who co-discovered black holes amongst his numerous achievements, was convinced that human brains cannot be adequately replicated by computers and set about trying to prove it and find a “missing science of consciousness”.
Shadows of the Mind wasn’t well received, most academics thinking that Penrose was better sticking to general relativity. Penrose’s argument – involving Godel’s theorem and “non-algorithmic thinking” – is convoluted and very hard for those of us with bog standard brains to follow. Maybe his critics were right about the details not making sense. I don’t know. But I believe his general thesis, which is that computers fundamentally differ from the brains of even the most vocal AI advocates.
It’s a minority point-of-view though. A mark of how much we revere computers is that a best-selling model is called Think Pad. Personally I know myself well enough to be confident that the best thinking I do is when staring at a blank sheet of paper, or out of the window at the garden, or going for a walk. And that computer screens after a while are positively stultifying.
Maybe others have different experience. But it certainly seems that “algorithmic thinking” isn’t doing Track and Trace any favours.